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Comment by alexasmyths | Hacker News Reader

"The only difference between this and any other marketing campaign is that you just happened to catch them this time."

I'm not sure this is fair.

By displaying false information, they are point-blank lying. That's misinformation. It should be illegal - it could be.

Some other tricks such as 'creating very expensive items which they never expect to sell' as a cognitive 'price anchor' - well, not quite the same thing.

I suggest there is a distinction between falsehoods and other forms of tricks.

In the end it probably doesn't matter, but I wouldn't mind one bit if there was some consumer protections concerning this.

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> By displaying false information, they are point-blank lying. That's misinformation.

As a devil's advocate, despite the presentation being scummy, there's definite consumer value to seeing tickets that sold. It helps correct an information imbalance between sellers and buyers. If all you saw were available tickets, you'd have no way of knowing whether they were being priced above market or not. By showing you two sales, provided they're actually real sales and picked arbitrarily (i.e. not picking the most expensive sales), they're giving you information about what other buyers are willing to pay for tickets. It's like seeing real estate comps...sure the houses have already been sold, but it helps you get a feel for whether the one you're looking at is being sold for a fair price.

"there's definite consumer value to seeing tickets that sold. It helps correct an information imbalance between sellers and buyers."

I don't think you're playing the devil's advocate.

By all means - they and and as you indicate - maybe should show recent tickets sold. That's valuable information.

But what they are showing is made up data. Not good. And definitely 'anti valuable'.

They are showing tickets that recently sold. Just regardless of whether or not they fit in your searches and whether or not they knew they were already sold at the time you loaded the page.

They are going out of their way to insert previously sold tickets at the top of searches to make things look busy. I never timed how long it could be from sale to "simulated sale" but there were a few that stuck around for probably 10 min (guesstimate, but it was long enough to grab my coworkers and discuss and look at the code and refresh a number of times).

If they only showed the sold tickets that would be OK. But they first show these tickets as available, them change them to sold in front of the user, as if they had just been purchased. This is outright lying.

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